If some people take it in the original length and some people take it in the shortened length, we’d be losing any form of standardization in this process.”
“The stamina we need to build in order to maintain focus throughout the entire exam is key. “One of the things that we are taught to prepare for is the length of the exam,” Mabeza said. One of many students who vocalized displeasure to the NBME through social media channels and emails was AMA member Russyan Mark Mabeza, a rising third-year medical student at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA who took Step 1 in a California Prometric testing center on May 9. On June 4 the USMLE program-overseen by the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) and the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB)- announced “for event-based testing, USMLE Step 1 and Step 2 CK will not include unscored pretest items, resulting in a slightly shorter exam.”Īlthough the USMLE program did clarify that the unscored pretest items are used for the purpose of obtaining statistics on question performance before those items were to be included in the actual exam, the fact that students taking exams at Prometric testing centers would be required to take exams with those items was met with displeasure from medical students preparing for the tests.
In response to that reality, the USMLE has looked for other methods, including event-based testing, during which the exam is administered concurrently to thousands of examinees in sittings at medical schools across the country. That backlog has resulted in confusion for students and a test-taker volume that cannot be handled by Prometric alone. With the USMLE’s exam proctoring vendor-Prometric-having its testing centers closed for much of the spring, a substantial backlog of test-takers has accumulated.
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